In Which I Repent On Free Speech Culture

I confess! I have been wrong, and have wronged many. I have called false things true and have slandered the upstanding as evil. I have expressed prideful, stubborn resistance to the concept of free speech culture, and been an apologist for the rankest cancellation. I have indulged in snobbish skepticism of the comparative risks that sophomore comp lit majors pose to the very freedoms that better men than I have fought and died to protect.

No more. Now I see the light. How could I not? Great beams of it have shone upon my eyes, cast by the best thinkers of our society. My inflexible dogmatism is no match for them. The insubstantial line I imagined between government force and private criticism has vanished like a mist. Now I see. Criticism is censorship. Is not all censorship speech? “You’re under arrest” is speech. “We the jury find the defendant guilty” is speech. “You’ve been found liable for defamation” is speech. We all agree those things are censorship. So how can brutal speech like “racist” and “antisemite” and “lunatic” and “disconcertingly puffy serial divorcee” and “I think I will chose to advertise elsewhere” not be censorship?

It took better men — titans of America, really — to show me. Elon Musk, billionaire scientific genius and social philosopher and equestrian innovator has explained it. As it was necessary to destroy Bến Tre to save it, it’s necessary to sue journalists for criticizing the way you exercise freedom of speech, to protect your right to utter that speech without anyone reacting negatively. It’s simple, and pure, like a koan. I am indebted, too, to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton — the stalwart of the speech-defending Federalist Society — who showed me that it’s necessary to use the apparatus of government to protect free speech by criminally investigating people who oppose and suppress free speech by criticizing how someone else uses it.

Musk and Paxton have converted me; they have immersed me in the baptismal font of free speech culture. I see that my focus has been wrong. I have been preoccupied with petty concerns — is this speech protected by the First Amendment? — and not with the more fundamental and important question: “does this speech make someone else feel uncomfortable about what they just said?”

I see now I was wrong, badly wrong, shamefully wrong, about recent events on Elon Musk’s ...